Member-owned AI cooperative — pre-launch
Pull up a chair.
This only works if
we do it together.
Potluck is a member-owned AI cooperative. Your AI runs on your device, your memory follows you across every session and tool, and when you need more compute than your machine can provide, your fellow members have your back. Governed one-member-one-vote — not by shareholders.
What Potluck is
Your AI runs on your device. Strong open-source models installed locally. No prompt logging. No training on you. No ads. The conversations you have with your AI stay on your computer unless you explicitly choose otherwise. The models are finally good enough to make this practical.
Memory that follows you. A local MCP server stores your facts, decisions, and tasks — persistently, across sessions and across agent vendors. A fact saved while using one coding agent is there when you switch to another next week. Your context, not theirs.
Community compute when you need it. When you need something bigger than your own machine can handle, members with idle hardware can opt in to contribute spare compute. Requests are dispatched with your identity stripped before they reach any peer. The cooperative puts capacity behind the people who need it.
Most AI products treat you as a customer. Potluck treats you as a member.
Concretely: most AI products have one hardcoded endpoint. The vendor is the service. You cannot un-pair the product from the company that ships it.
Potluck inverts that. The protocol is the product. The cooperative is one operator of that protocol. If Potluck ever stops being worth it, members can point the same desktop app at their own coordinator — a URL change, not a migration. Member sovereignty is an architectural property, not a marketing promise.
Legally it is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. Members vote one-member-one-vote on model support, roadmap direction, and governance changes. Active contributors earn real equity — not tokens, not credits that evaporate. The charter prohibits selling user data. Full stop.
What we believe
- AI should work for the people who use it, not the other way around.
- Privacy is a feature, not a premium tier.
- Access should not be gated by a $200 monthly subscription.
- Ownership and governance belong with members, not shareholders.
- Contributions deserve rewards, but rewards should not buy power.
- Honesty about what we can and cannot do is worth more than hype.
We need the first hundred people.
Not because the product is finished. Because this only works if the right people show up while it is being built.
We are looking for engineers with idle hardware who want to help test an early contributor network, and people who would rather be members of something than customers of it.
Pre-launch means no dues yet. Just signal that you want this to exist.
- Shipped
- Mesh stack, memory server, inference dispatch
- In flight
- NLnet grant application (deadline June 1)
- Designed
- PBC incorporation, member auth, equity program
- To be decided
- Public membership opens — date TBD
Join the waitlist
We will reach out when early access opens. No spam.
Read the full founding document: Potluck AI manifesto